Come Saturday, Ohio City will be bedlam, as it is most Saturdays. The intersection of West 25th and Lorain will be endlessly logjammed as the suburban tourists descend upon the West Side Market with their bags and their strollers and all the force and rancor of the Uruk-hai.

Cars have shaped much of the North American West, including Cascadia, where drive-through restaurants, shopping centers, highway strip malls, and single-family neighborhoods miles from commercial services dominate much of the urban and suburban landscape.

One of Dickens's villains boasts that he's never moved by a pretty face, for he can see the grinning skull beneath. That's realism, he says. But it's a strange kind of realism that can look through life in all its vibrancy to focus only on death.

Jeff Wood, Reconnecting America's New Media Director and Chief Cartographer, collects news stories and blog posts about transit and transit-oriented development from around the country and posts them at TheDirectTransfer.com. Jeff then takes the top 10 articles in each of five categories and sends that out as Other Side of the Tracks email newsletter. The content of that email is then posted here.